As the Internet of Cars draws near, here’s what drivers don’t want

Automakers think car buyers are in love with slick connected car features, like buying a song you just heard or updating your Facebook status while parking. Not so. More often, drivers and passengers want mainstream features that get them to their destination faster and then find a place to park. The driver’s top five requests today are on-demand real-time traffic information, automated map updates, real-time weather and news, real-time parking spot finder, and driving assessment/coaching.

“This is a defining year for the auto industry [and] the connected vehicle,” said Thilo Koslowski, VP for automotive at the Gartner tech consultancy, speaking at the Consumer Telematics Show in Las Vegas the day before CES opened. “You will see lots of examples [at CES] of the connected vehicle becoming the main innovator of mobile and IOT [Intenet of Things] innovation. It’s about how the car is connected in the future to the other pieces of our daily lives.” This is the Internet of Cars, or IOC.

Why drivers want assessment and coaching

The top five driver wants for connected-car technology are from a 2014 Gartner study. They underscore that most drivers want things that get you from A to B to P (parking) quicker. The outlier is driver assessment and coaching: You get cheaper insurance if you plug in a Progressive Insurance Snapshot dongle to the car’s onboard diagnostic connector (OBDC) and give up some of your privacy in exchange for being monitored. You drive more cautiously and get cheaper rates. For some risky drivers, this can be the difference between no insurance and insurance.

GM’s OnStar telematics system just hopped on the bandwagon and does the monitoring without the need to plug in a connector. This is in conjunction with Progressive. Other insurance companies are also offering driver assessment.

The coaching part includes drowsy driver detection as offered by Mercedes-Benz and others, as well as the feedback from lane departure warning, blind spot detection, and adaptive cruise control, effectively telling the driver, “Don’t do that, OK?”

The bottom three

According to the same Gartner study of US drivers in 2014, the least desired connected driving features are in-vehicle social networking options, in-vehicle media purchases, and application downloads directly into the car. In other words, car buyers care less about flashy features that only a few might use or that automakers see as a recurring revenue stream. They should be making their money selling cars, not promoting Taylor Swift downloads.

Other connected car trends

There are about 25 million connected cars today worldwide, with that number expected to grow to 150 million in 2020. In comparison, there are 7 billion Internet of Things connected devices now, and there should be 30 billion in 2020. With those numbers in mind, here are other key trends discussed at the Consumer Telematics Show.

Microsoft’s self-driving car

Self-driving cars continue to move forward. Volvo and Audi hinted they will have significant announcements this year. That noted, the fully autonomous car is still years off. Drivers in general are nervous about cost and giving up control to the car but experiencing the building block tools of self-driving available now — adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and lane keep assist, blind spot detection — will make motorists more comfortable with the future. But cost has to come way down. One of the key sensors, a road scanner, used to cost $80,000; now it’s down to $8,000 but that’s only one piece of the equation and $8,000 is still not a rounding error on the price of the vehicle.

Connected wearable devices in the car have promise, but it’s not clear exactly how much is promise and how much is hope somebody can make money off it. A wristwatch with Bluetooth could connected to your smartphone and remotely unlock or start your car, but your phone could do that, too. “The killer app would be biometrics, something that monitors your pulse,” said Vijitha Chekuri, a director of connected vehicle solutions for Lochbridge.

There’s mixed opinion about how much buyers are willing to spend for embedded modems in cars. They have stronger signals, they’re always available, and they’re getting cheaper. A 3G device installed today might not work with the cellular infrastructure in 10 years.

“We need to continue to connecting modems in the car,” said Peter Vir, head of connected technologies and apps at Jaguar Land Rover. Clearly, $50,000 cars are a more fertile market except at GM where the push is to put 4G embedded into every car. Kia said its K900 premium sedan — the $60,000 Kia — because that kind of buyer demographic expects embedded. Plus, said Jaguar’s Vir, “We need [embedded] connected, else how else will I preheat my vehicle?”

the best addons i ever had on a car would be:
1. the utility light chevy had in my 89 scotsdale. it was in the engine compartment, and had a cord that could reach the spare tire under the bed. great for changing a tire, or working under the hood. the magnet mount meant you could slap it anywhere on the body and have light where you needed it. then just coil it back up and your done.

2. 94 lumina apv: use the key to unlock any door, and hold in the unlock position 3 seconds, all the locks would pop.

3. 89 Plymouth voyager: turn knobs on the celing just behind the 1st row opened the rearmost windows

4. 2013 cruise: going a little faster than the guy ahead and don’t want to pass? on the left side of the steering wheel, you can hit the switch up or down and adjust the set cruise by 1mph at a time.

unfortunetally, the chevy cruise also has the worst feature i had in a car so far. the right hand of the steering wheel has another up/down lever that works as a source key. UNTIL you get into the xm radio, then it changes channels and you have to hit source on the radio to get out.

Marco

As for my own preferences, I tend to fall in with the group that wants A to B to P. Until the blessed day when I can get in the car and have it take me where I want to go with no input from me, I don’t care about any kind of connectivity. I don’t want a car that tries to suck my time away by bringing apps to me. I want one that frees up my time by driving for me. Then, and only then, will I feel good about using that time how I choose to do so. And that will often involve turning my seat to interact with the others around me.

mrseanpaul81

couldn’t agree more!

Zunalter

I shall settle for nothing less than automated parking/pickup.

codeJunkie

I just want a physical on/off switch to the radio so I can disable any and all internet connectivity. I’m over internet companies using me as their product without paying me.

thx1138v2

The thing that worries me about the connected car is the inevitable, “We don’t support that vehicle anymore. You’ll have to upgrade to our latest model.” Which would come around just about the time it was paid for.

Tom

Or long after, if you’re like me and tend only to buy/afford cars that are nearly a decade old. -_-

thx1138v2

I buy them new and drive them into the ground. I also do all my own maintenance so I know it’s done right. My last purchase was 1995 and it’s still running strong.
But what you said brings up the point that they could theoretically be remotely disabled so the vehicle is no longer operable or have a timer that disables them after some given amount of time.
In my case, the vehicle would just die. In your case, nothing over the time period would be operable so you wouldn’t have that option.

http://www.cardinalphoto.com/ David Cardinal

Amen. I nearly cry every time I sit through a car company presentation explaining that their big achievement is a way to display Facebook status updates on my dashboard.

Techngro

I just want a cup holder that can fit my super-sized gigantor extra value meal drink. 64 oz. for only twenty cents more.

Go ‘Murica!

Tom

It bothers me that you have my user name. Furthermore, it appears your aunt loves her new job so much that she does it for 7.5 hours a day, 52 hours a week.

I wish Disqus was better at spamproofing. They don’t seem to care at all.

I’ve got most of this on my phone. Why duplicate all that functionality? Why have 2 different, incompatible systems doing the same thing?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply connect my existing phone to the car?

Bill Howard

As me987654 noted below, motorists don’t necessarily need this in the car when you can have it on the phone … as long as it replicates on the center stack display. *But* as we moved to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, we’ll find that what displays is only what Apple allows. A lot of apps may not be usable.

jqpabc123

… we’ll find that what displays is only what Apple allows.

This sounds like a marketing issue, not a technological (or even logical) one

I’ve got an easy solution to this … don’t buy Apple. If enough people follow suit, I’m betting that Apple will discover a way around this artificial limitation.

me987654

Simple – I want an easy way to display my phone (or whatever device) screen on the main screen of the car. Run google maps on the phone and see it displayed on the car. Could easily be done with hdmi in or something similar….although wireless makes the most sense

Zepid

Let’s take a step back and resume analog features missing from most cars. Things like capless gas tanks (pressure hatch instead, like on Fords and jets), umbrella holder tube inside the door seal, drive-by-wire digital steering (analog style has that awful noise when you maximize your turn radius), tires with honeycombing inside to prevent explosive decompression when punctured at highway speeds, self-healing glass (it is a thing, why isn’t it in my car), transitional coating for the windows/windshield (like glasses, they tent based on light intensity), anti-glare coating for windshields (don’t you hate seeing light streaks when you’re driving in the rain or at night), THE REMOVAL OF THE OBTUSE CENTER CONSOLE (you know what I mean, when the dashboard evolves so negatively that it begins encroaching on your legroom and laproom we have a serious problem), standardized service-code printout (why do I need to plug a damn system into my cigarette lighter to understand what that service light means, or more recently switch tray/computer board, why can’t it just fucking display with a button called INFO), and the list goes on.

Dan Lokemoen

I effing hate it when something I own, especially something expensive (like my new laptop) tries to sell me something. The first thing I did when I tried Windows 10 was hide or delete every connection to the Windows App Store. If my car tried to sell me some Tom Petty songs, I might drive it into a river.

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